Citadel Dispatch

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Rob is the cofounder of AnchorWatch, a company focused on providing secure bitcoin storage and insurance using native bitcoin miniscript functionality. Customers are able to maintain custody of their bitcoin while having best in class Lloyds of London coverage against loss and theft.

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AnchorWatch: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

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(00:03:18) Introduction of Rob Hamilton

(00:06:58) Financialization of Bitcoin and Yield Strategies

(00:16:40) Miniscript: Advanced Bitcoin Scripting

(00:32:44) AnchorWatch: Insurance for Self Custody Bitcoin

(01:08:56) Open Source and Business Strategy

(01:21:22) OP_NEXT Conference and Bitcoin Development

(01:32:00) Collaborative Custody and Institutional Solutions

(01:33:02) Bitcoin Bugle and PodConf

[00:00:00] Unknown:

Think it's held up exceptionally well. I think Bitcoin bulls should be inspired by the performance, and it's set up to rally significantly   if we get a period of stability in the broader equity markets. It's worth remembering the last time we had true economic chaos during the start of COVID,   Bitcoin waked down to $5,000   and even below that. Today, we're talking about $80,000.   It's a different asset. It has a broader   distribution of institutional ownership. And, again, I think what it's telling you is once this market volatility stabilizes,  

[00:00:32] Unknown:

we're gonna see it return to new all time highs and then beyond. It's really a display of strength from my perspective. Wanna jump off of the spot Bitcoin market and talk about options market because in the middle of all this, at the April,   you launched a covered   call strategy over at Bitwise.   How does this work, and what's the adoption been like?  

[00:00:53] Unknown:

Yeah. We're really pleased by the reception we've had for these strategies. They write covered calls on leading crypto equities like MicroStrategy   or Marathon or Coinbase.   The idea is that the defining feature of crypto, one of its defining features is volatility.   And how do you translate volatility into an asset? Well, you write calls   against volatile positions, and you can generate really substantial income. So we've seen strong trading, particularly in the micro strategy product, I missed. I think it's going to have a broad reception from investors who want to have exposure to crypto, but also generate   significant yields and significant income over time. What role does cryptocurrency  

[00:01:33] Unknown:

play in a world where these currencies across the world are becoming more volatile?  

[00:01:39] Unknown:

I love that question. I think the answer to who wins in this currency war is Bitcoin.   Right? When I watched all the tariff confusion play out and what will Trump do and what will China do and how many bilateral deals will we negotiate,   the thing that's clearest to me from all that   is that we should expect the US dollar to move lower, that we're moving from a world of the US dollar being the sole reserve currency to a world with potentially multiple reserve currencies.   Bitcoin benefits when fiat currencies go lower.   Bitcoin benefits when there's new space for reserve assets. I think it's the cleanest investment   response   to the chaos and confusion we're seeing from this tariffs,   specifically be because it's the hedge   against fiat currency debasement. And I think we're setting up for that in The US, in China, in Europe, and around the world.  



[00:03:18] ODELL:

Yo.   Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch,   the interactive   live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and FreedomTech   discussion.   That intro clip   was   I don't know how to pronounce his name. Matt Hogan,   CIO of Bitwise,   talking about Bitcoin   on Bloomberg.   It was a little bit of an old clip. Bitcoin was at $78,000.   So I don't know. Maybe it was, like, a week old or a week and a half old. The suits are not sending their best clips. I don't there was a scarcity of suit clips out there,   and,   I had to use I had to use what I could find now that I'm trying   to go on another streak of making dispatch   have   regular regular   showings.  

Let's see how quick how how far this run can go.   Anyway,   I have a good friend here, Rob Hamilton,   ride or die freak,   return guest.   We're gonna be talking about MiniScript. We're gonna be talking about Anchor Watch, the company he founded around MiniScript and insurance.   Before we get there, so dispatch is the interactive live show with no ads or sponsors.   And as a result, it is brought to you by viewers like you supporting the show with Bitcoin.   2 ways you can do that. You can either join us in the Noster live chat, which is at civildispatch.com/stream.   We already have   bunch of rider dies in the live chat participating in the show. Mav 21 is already zapped 10,000 sets. And the other way the other best way is using fountain podcast app or other podcasting two point o apps and sending sets to the show when you listened   that way. And we have   the top zap   of the week was from ride or die freak JCB with 10,000 sats.  

Anyway,   Rob, thank you for joining.  

[00:05:14] Rob Hamilton:

Thanks for having me. It's a long time.   Well, I think it was   two years   ago since that last came on. It was, like, February of twenty three. Yeah. So it's been about two years.  

[00:05:26] ODELL:

No way. You've been on since then.  

[00:05:29] Rob Hamilton:

On dispatch?  

[00:05:30] ODELL:

Yeah.  

[00:05:31] Rob Hamilton:

When?   Really?   A man never forgets when he's on Sedell dispatch. It's, you know, like,  

[00:05:38] ODELL:

you  

[00:05:39] Rob Hamilton:

I'm not really on the cool kids' table. You know? I'm I'm one of the pointers.  

[00:05:44] ODELL:

I mean, it's kind of cool   because you started as a rider die freak   before ten thirty one existed and then you launched a Bitcoin business and then ten thirty one supported you. It's kind of cool. We've our journey together is   warrants more more than one dispatch. So I'm glad we're getting the second one out of the way. You'd think, Marty has me on his, you know, his podcast, you know, which which shows that?  

[00:06:10] Rob Hamilton:

We've had you on RHR a couple times. Right? You know. I've I've been on our HR a couple of times. Yeah. I get on our HR. So that's Yeah. I get on our HR.   And, you know, there's, there's another really good Bitcoin show called Bitcoin. Review, like a list of Okay. Anyway,  

[00:06:26] ODELL:

so the zaps we got,   Rob, you zapped our own show. Thank you for your support. Have you ever   had a guest on the show zap during the show? I don't. I think this is the first time new, new, world record   largest zap by a guest on the show. First time ever.   And we have scarcity fight club with 21,000 SAS. Yeah. We did a lot of Bitcoin reviews together.   And   so that's also, and that was originally syndicated on this feed as well. So you kinda got those in. That's   right. Anyway,   do you have any response to the Bitwise clip in the beginning?  

[00:07:06] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. I think this is going towards the general financialization   of Bitcoin. Right? The the first   unlock,   you know, when Bitcoin started,   there was no institutional   entity. Right? It started as fully   either mining it yourself or peer to peer trading.   And then those markets evolved into kind of, like, centralized custodians where you could buy the Bitcoin and you could withdraw it.   And now the next wrapper and that unlocked a massive wave of adoption. Right? Because most people weren't gonna run their own Bitcoin node to, like, mine blocks. Right? Those that did were really, like, niche, like, tech power users. And And then the next unlock was an exchange. Oh, I can just go to this website. I deposit money. I get Bitcoin. Most people held it there. Some people withdrew, but it expanded the tent. And the next kind of, like, concentric circle I see are the ETFs, where, like, I don't have to even go to a website anymore. I could just go to my Fidelity, my Schwab account, and I could just buy shares of a company. And so websites.   But yeah. Well, in the same, you're going to a general investor website as opposed to, like, the Bitcoin   website. Right? No. Totally. You're right. Fidelity.com is a website. You know, fact check. True. That's why you're you're a good journalist. You're just on top of the beat and doing those live Yeah. I only ask the hard questions on the I'm one of the few in the space that do. That's right.  

And then so the next, like, layer of this is, like, okay. Rather than it being the spot, how do you get exposure to other things? Right? So covered calls   where you're holding the underlying asset and you sell an option to be able to buy it in the future and you get a premium off that. It's kinda these advanced   derivatives. Right? And I think there's versions of this. The Bitwise   product is kind of taking a basket of a bunch of companies. You have with MicroStrategy   or now strategy, MSTR, and then MSTY with the yield. Like, I just view this as part of more of the finalization and monetizing, like, the volatility of Bitcoin.   So MSTY is not Bitwise, but I it sounded like he was announcing that Bitwise launched an MSTY competitor. Right? It it sounded like it was gonna be part MSTY, but diversified across, he said, marathon and, like, other companies that would have covered calls too. Right? So any company with, like, a Bitcoin treasury that's similar like a micro strategy, you can get more of those as an umbrella. What's your opinion on this MSTY thing? It seems to be,  

[00:09:12] ODELL:

the suit coiners seem to love it.  

[00:09:15] Rob Hamilton:

So   I'm fine with it as, like   you well, first off, you've already taken a step outside of it's not Bitcoin. It's not the spot Bitcoin you're holding your own keys. Right? So Well, that's the funniest cope. Right? It's, like, it's I'm still in Bitcoin because I'm buying MSTY.   You're you're just not. Right?   Like, there's just be, like, a hardliner. You're not. I think that you're getting Bitcoin price exposure, but that's different than holding the Bitcoin itself. Are you getting Bitcoin price exposure?   Well, MSTY specifically, you're actually more of monetizing   the volatility of Bitcoin. And so   not not to make this a full suit coin or show talking about, like, stocks and derivatives That's a good place to start. Yeah. The warm end before we get to the yeah. Before we put everyone to sleep talking about Bitcoin script.  

So you basically have,   stocks with,   volatility. You can have an option in the future to either buy theirs buy or sell them. And the more volatile the stock is,   kind of, like, the more,   more ability to be able to monetize these, like like, covered call premiums because the price, you don't know what it is in the future.   And at a high level, like, you can tell that I don't really   highest level, but just you're monetizing the volatility   of the MS Smart stock, which is And then you get paid dividends.   And you get paid dividends. Right. Because you're basically   like, you're you're always better off if you're financially sophisticated in doing your own covered calls because you're paying someone else to run the financial,  

[00:10:39] ODELL:

Yeah. They're collecting a fee. They collect a fee. Absolutely. Right? But then the actual stock goes down   as you're getting paid out the dividends.  

[00:10:48] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah.   So you're not getting any Bitcoin price exposure. So you what you're able to do is you could reinvest the dividends to kind of, like, maintain your position,   but you're not getting right. In that sense, you you don't, like, buy and hold it,   and you just like a Bitcoin 10 x's. You don't always guarantee a 10 x, like, return. I mean, there was the, Matthew Block here that company, like, was it ten ten one finance and people doing covered calls? There are people that were working on, like, native ways you could do,   covered call strategy. We can earn yield on Bitcoin by by locking up your Bitcoin and doing a covered call strategy. Now in that case, you are posting up your own Bitcoin. So if the contract exercised it, you could be moved against and lose your Bitcoin because you had to be able to, you know, give up your Bitcoin as part of that covered call. But it's a different   it's a different level of risk appetite.  

I'm noticing it get to a massive crescendo on Twitter, which makes me wonder if the crates really trades really crowded at this point if everyone's talking about it and doing it.   A lot of people are talking about it and doing it, and they're, like, selling significant amounts of Bitcoin to do it. That I wouldn't advise. I do find it interesting because I don't see that chat on Nostra. I only see that chat on x. Maybe your Nostra feed is different than mine, but I'm not seeing I mean, when I UI talk.  

[00:11:55] ODELL:

When I talk to when I talk to investors,   it's comes up all the time. Totally.  

[00:12:00] Rob Hamilton:

That that makes sense. Like, because it's kind of like this idea of, like, you're viewing yourself as a sophisticated investor, and everyone wants to put Bitcoin to work. And and this was my kind of,   my observation was like, wow. There's a lot of Bitcoiners that are really interested in getting yield on their Bitcoin. Right? Because I think this is the is this the block five this cycle?   Is what the block five, the covered call yield strategy, like, wrapped equity token like, wrapped equities? Yeah. Like,   I don't think it's BlockFi in the same way because it's not rehypothecation,   if that makes sense. Right? Right. It's not it's not gonna if there is an unwind in the trade, it's not gonna happen the same way. And I don't have any reason to think that it's, like, outright, like, someone just forgot to you know, someone barred against their Bitcoin and then the counterparty lost it. So it's not gonna be that level of, like, crap. But, like,   I could very well see,   since there's so much hype, interest, and attention on this stuff, you're you're gonna start seeing diminishing returns on the on it. And then there's a whole question around the MNAV where if it starts collapsing to a point where,   you're paying a premium to buy Bitcoin.  

And the thesis is is that you're able to earn more yield,   bit more Bitcoin per share. So that justifies paying a premium to the underlying spot Bitcoin price.   I'm a grog brain. I just view it as efficient markets that over time, that is just gonna compress and compress. Efficient. But yeah.  

[00:13:22] ODELL:

In the long run, I just view it as, like, kind of, like, compressing. Right? So Well, I mean, the bigger thing is, yeah. I don't think it's the block even though that's a provocative comment. Yeah.   It's it's similar to BlockFi in that   people are just obsessed with yield.   And they just it's a marshmallow test. Like, they can't just   accumulate an asset that increases 60% year over year over the last ten years.   I mean, the other piece I think   that's important here is   so the MSTY product, my understanding has been around for about fourteen months. Yep. And if you crunch the numbers,   you'd be better off   buying the MSTY. And then if you back test it for the last fourteen months, it's a short timeframe.  



[00:14:06] Rob Hamilton:

Right.  

[00:14:08] ODELL:

I think,   I think we have Phil in the live chat. I see Phil.   I think that   at some point, like Bitcoin is just going to blow it away in terms of returns.   Right? Like it's it's to me, it feels like this marshmallow test, this idea that the marshmallow test, I guess, is used as an example of of low time preference and long term thinking. Because the whole idea is like, you could tell a child, like, if he doesn't eat the first marshmallow, you'll give him two marshmallows, but most children will just eat the one marshmallow.   Totally. Because they wanna eat it right away.  

And, and so my comparison would be all the Bitcoiners that are historically have been like obsessed with cashflow. Right. And if you go back like   any time period   in the last fifteen years of Bitcoin,   anyone who sold Bitcoin to buy, like, investment real estate for cash flow got absolutely wrecked in comparison to just holding Bitcoin. Right. And that's what this feels like. And you don't even get it. I I don't there's not even a tax benefit   because you're paying taxes on the dividend and it's, you know, it's regular income tax.   It's actually a higher tax rate. If you hold it in a four zero one k, is that the same thing if you hold it in a four zero one k? Is that the same thing if you hold it in a four zero one k? Right. But the but the whole meme is like, oh, I want cash flow so that I don't have to sell my Bitcoin.  

But it's like Right. You could just hold Bitcoin and take,  

[00:15:36] Rob Hamilton:

you know, sell or spend it as you need it, and I think you'll outperform it. Oh, not by the way, happy tax day, everyone, yesterday. I hope everyone Happy tax day. Yeah. Everyone's done their part. I saw the petroleum accounting team. I gave them a salute, thanking them for their service, doing the good work of making sure everyone pays their taxes.   They're great. Yeah. They're, best accountants in the space. Yeah. They they've been locking down the park. Like they've just been locking it down, getting their work done. I've been staying in a way to make sure they can, get their work done.  

[00:16:05] ODELL:

Okay. Well, anyway, guys, this is not the topic of the conversation, but, Macro.   I just just I I think people that stay on one stack stats will outperform,  

[00:16:16] Rob Hamilton:

buying MSTI. So just use that as you will. But My final thought would be there's so many premiums when you buy these derivative products that ultimately in the long run, I think that underlying holding spot Bitcoin with your own keys, like, is the way to actually play the long term mark market. We have John with 21,000  

[00:16:33] ODELL:

sets.   Thank you for the zap. Thank you for the support saying he is the yield. Thank you for being the yield.   Okay.   Let's jump into.   Let's jump into mini script real quick. We talked to, we mini script briefly came up   in last week's conversation with Dan Gould.   If you haven't listened to that, consider listening to it. You can just search Civil Dispatch in your favorite podcast app.   But what is MiniScript, and why should people care?  

[00:17:02] Rob Hamilton:

So MiniScript   is   a way of   writing Bitcoin script   that could be more,   advanced   and complicated   without   accidentally,   like, deleting your money. So to take it at a really high level, I call it bowling with bumpers   in that when to to really lay the context,   every Bitcoin   address that you see on the network I'm just gonna start there and work my way down. Every Bitcoin address is,   for the most part I know there's exceptions, but for the most part, it's a hash   of some data.   Typically, it's either a hash of a single public key or it's a hash of a script.   And what you do under the hood   is you when it comes time for you to spend that Bitcoin, you say, not just I have these signatures, you say, hey. I have this script, and it matches the hash tied to this address. And then from there, the script does the things you want. Right? So the very simple one would be just checking the hash and checking the signature, which is a single sig. You use op check sig, does a single sig. Then the, other more popular one is you have a script of, like, multiple keys, and then you run op check multisig. Right? You have a multisig. The thing is is that Bitcoin as programmable money has more use cases than just those. Typically,   you see a focus on those two.  

I would say there's a couple kind of key points. One, software wallets, being able to visualize and explain how it works,   hardware wallets and signing to make sure it's kind of standardized so you understand what you're committing to,   and,   being able to organize the transaction. I think we really take it for granted when we have really powerful tools like Sparrow   that just take care of all of that stuff for you, and you just see a picture on screen and it works. You Bitcoin is a very specific   picky language in Bitcoin script, and you have to have all of this information. Thankfully, we're at a place where there's plenty of software out there that can kind of handle most of those use cases for you. The reason why you'd wanna use MiniScript, though, is if you wanna enable   a little bit more,   options in how you can spend your Bitcoin.  

A really basic example is that you could actually have a two of three multisig that maybe becomes a one of three multisig after some time passes. Right? And this leverages time locks. So up to this point, time locks really only get used in lightning at scale for the lightning channels. It's called a hash time lock contract. You have a hash lock for,   the justice transaction to make sure that people aren't committing to old state or trying to broadcast old state. And then you have the time lock where, Matt, if I have a lightning channel with you and I force close you,   you can immediately spend the money because I force closed on you. But   on my side, since I initiated the force closed,   I have to wait a period of time. And the reason why that exists, it gives you an opportunity to be like, hey. Rob is cheating me. I'm gonna now take all the money in the channel. Right? So this is, like, this multi step like, there's money with there's multiple ways you can spend the lightning channel, technically.  

And what ManyScript allows you to do is say, well, there's a lot more things you can do in Bitcoin. And how can you safely build all of those transactions in such a way that you're not going to if you're manually encoding it by hand and you're like, oh, I meant to do,   hash the data, then check the signature instead of checking the signature, then and, like and if you just do it wrong, you deposit money in there, you can just the money's gone. Right? Like like, you you can easily buy on your own computer,   make a Bitcoin script that is provably unspendable,   and then, like, you could make it be, like, one equals two. Like, one   two one equal two fail. Like, it will just permanently fail forever. And so what MiniScript does is it takes all of these complexities and kind of, like, foot guns, and it puts it in a really nice box.  

Specifically, it's more of a developer tool, but what's more exciting about talking to it is what the other use cases it can enable.   And around that, I would say is that I mentioned already time logs. And for those who didn't listen to this, Sunil dispatch number sixty eight two years ago, which was the last time I was on, there's two types of time locks in Bitcoin.   You have a relative time lock It was still dispatch 86.   80 6. Okay.   Well, BIP 68 is relative time locks. That's why I had it on top of my mind. So BIP 68 relative time locks. And this is a really interesting one where the timer starts   the moment funds get confirmed on chain. Is and this is using the end sequence element of a Bitcoin transaction, which most people never have to either think or worry about because it doesn't really matter.  

And what that does is that what the moment funds get deposited on chain, you are able to,   start start a timer. This is actually what Liana wallet uses. So you can have one wallet, and then based on the last time that UTXO moved, you have a different kind of spending condition. So I could have it set up in a way, almost like a dead man switch, where   if I haven't,   moved the Bitcoin in a year,   you can have some other new spending condition get enabled.   Now the other kind of time lock is an absolute time lock, which,   is based on a fixed time. You're either before it or you're after it. And the way this works at a high level is every single Bitcoin transaction, Satoshi originally actually encoded time locks into Bitcoin,   but they were at the transaction level. Think of it like if, I'm not sure if all of the Zoomers who listen to sit all dispatch remember these things. We used to have these things called checks.  

They were pieces of paper, and they represented money at your bank account. And in the check, you had a date field. So you can in theory, I could write you a check for a million dollars. Right? And then I date it to, you know, 01/01/2026.   You could go to the bank and be like, hey. I like to deposit this. They would look at the check and say, well, it's not dated for today. You can't use it yet. That's actually what the end lock time field is in Bitcoin. It exists since Satoshi initially implemented it,   and it still exists to this day. And that's actually how absolute time locks work. So what absolute time locks do, though, as opposed to that, the first problem with the transaction level time lock is that,   let's say I give you a UTXO, Matt, and I could give you a whole Bitcoin,   but it's dated to block height 1,000,000.  

The problem is is I could go take that UTXO and I can go spend it   before Block High 1,000,000 and then your presigned check doesn't do anything. Right? Because I've already spent the input. So what time locks do The check bounces and that's The check bounces. Yeah. The the network rejects the transaction. Your check bounced.   Maybe because I write you a check on paper and then I close my bank account before that that date comes. Right? I could do that in theory. So way time locks work in Bitcoin,   in the context of mini script in Bitcoin script is the relative time lock, which I mentioned earlier. And then the absolute time lock, what it does is it actually in the Bitcoin script, when you're going to spend it, we'll actually evaluate it and say, wait a second. Like, you have a time lock here. I'm gonna reference in this transaction   the end lock time and then have I met or exceeded that? Now there's one more mechanic.  

And that absolute time lock, we use at AnchorWatch because you have, an insurance contract that expires on a certain date.   And because of that, we use the absolute time lock because after your insurance policy expires, you can unilaterally, as a customer, take the money out. Now   one thing to kinda tie that in there, though, is there are two ways you can do time in Bitcoin.   You can do block height or you can do the actual epoch timestamp or also knows like wall time, clock time. Right? Now block height is pretty straightforward because it's entirely internal into Bitcoin. You know what the current block height is. That's pretty straightforward.   The thing, though and this is one of those things, like, going down the time lock rabbit hole. Like, one of the things I find most profound about Bitcoin,   there is one   Bitcoin is entirely self referential,   meaning that you build off top of the previous block, which is a bunch of transactions and a bunch of hashes, and it kind of goes all the way back to the beginning. It's entirely self referential.  

There's one thing in Bitcoin   that comes from outside of Bitcoin,   and that's the time stamp the miners put in the block header. And the reason why they do this is to do the difficulty adjustment.   Right? How does the Bitcoin network know that two weeks what is supposed to be two weeks? Right? And if you have a 44 blocks a day,   and 14 blocks to make it fourteen days,   every 2,016   blocks, the Bitcoin network says, hey. The current time is this, whatever it is right now. Right? You know? Oh, I think we're at, nineteen hundred UTC nineteen thirty three UTC at the moment.   But what was it   2,016   blocks ago? And then it says, oh, was it a really long time? If so, decrease adjustment. Was it really fast? Increase the difficulty.  

And there's actually just two little fun trivia facts because this is the kind of place dispatch   is the place to kind of explore this, is there's   two time constraints.   And how do you actually and this is, like, for how Bitcoin just works as in consensus.   There's two rules   in how you manage time. Because the problem with time and this is actually what I would highly recommend reading, Gigi's Bitcoin is Time. It's one of my favorite pieces in Bitcoin, very, heavily under referenced.   The one thing like, the the problem with time is that it's a decentralized construct and that my computer may have a time and your computer have a time, and maybe they're off by a couple seconds. Right?   The way Bitcoin keeps track of time in BIP one thirteen says, if you are a miner creating a block,   your time stamp in your block header   must be greater than the median time of the past 11 blocks. So you find 11 blocks, you sort them in order and say, okay. Here are the time stamps. You pick that middle one and say, it has to be bigger than this.  

Someone posted yesterday on Twitter. Someone noticed a block was found,   and it was like, I'll make the math. Like, block height 100   was, like, six minutes ago, and then block height one zero one was, like, eight minutes ago. And they're like, wait a like like, wait a second. This is the newer block. It should be more in the future. And this is part of that fuzzing in Bitcoin. The natural nature of it is that,   when you're doing time stamp management,   you have a little bit of a fuzzy nature of time. It's also a field that miners use when they're doing the the actual ASICs themselves or doing the hashing. They can cycle different time stamps   to kind of, like, get more pulls at the slot reel before they get another batch of work from from a pool.  

And,   this is a really interesting thing. The other constraint. So you can't go further back than the median time of the past 11 blocks. That's BIP one one three.   You can't go further in the future than two hours of your local computer block. So if I was running a Bitcoin node on my computer and I set the date on my computer system time to be   June of this year, I would reject every block on the network. I would actually I wouldn't fork because I wouldn't be making new blocks, but I would stop getting new blocks because the network could be like, hey. Like, this is way too far in the future. You can't lie about the time going into the future. So you have this rough coordination of every single node on the network has their own different system time, and that two hours gives wiggle room to make sure that no one's that miners can't get too far ahead into the future.   So those are, like, the big constraints. And then usually, Jameson Law has a really good article on this.  

It's roughly fuzzing within a couple minutes, really, of, like, whatever time is, like, on your watch versus the time and the time stamp. At most, it's a couple minutes normally, but that   so we use,   Liana uses a relative time lock with block height, and we at Anchor Watch use an absolute time lock based on the calendar time because we need to we can't, do an insurance contract for a hundred thousand blocks. We have to do it anchored to some piece of paper that knows we all know what time it is, so we use the actual wall time. So that's probably the past two years.   I've gotten better and better at kind of going into those technical details and explaining just touching the transactions and doing more of it,   but you're able to use time locks. So that's just time locks. So MiniScript allows you to do time locks. And everything I described, you could do whatever you want in there. And then you also can do,   thresholds of thresholds. So you could do a multi sig of multi sig, which is pretty cool. And you also can do hash locks, which is a own different kind of side use case. But at a high level, just kind of talking through this,   ManyScript allows any application dev to build kind of whatever policy you want within reason, and it will make sure you don't have foot guns in how you're clicking all these LEGO bricks together to be able to build Bitcoin transactions.  

So   that's my, time lock and high level,   technical miniscript talk.  

[00:28:51] ODELL:

Nice.   Great explanation.  

[00:28:54] Rob Hamilton:

Thank you. Thank you. I,   I, Becca was just on the Natalie Brunel podcast, and Becca described mini script in, like, three sentences. And she Natalie said, wow. That's way better than Bob has ever explained it. But, you know, I'm here for the freaks. I'm here to give the alpha to the freaks. So I'm here to go into all the technical things because that's what everyone tunes in here for, not macro talk.  

[00:29:15] ODELL:

Okay. I'm I'd I we got to the point where I was just assumed you're just gonna keep going. So then you caught me off guard when you wrapped.   I, so in so   so that's, like, the technical side of Yeah. Of   of what Manuscript enables. From a practical perspective,   what what can users use it for? Yeah. So  

[00:29:38] Rob Hamilton:

to take a step back, the the first example I think a lot of people think about is degrading multisigs or multisig that change spending conditions over time.  

[00:29:46] ODELL:

I have a I have a two or three multisig, and   I lose two of my keys, but it degrades to one, so I can still spend it at some point in the future. Exactly. Or what you could do as an alternative. That's a perfectly valid example.  

[00:29:59] Rob Hamilton:

What you could also do is you maybe you have a two of three   that becomes a two of four. Right? You could have someone   offer to come in as a cosigner if the funds haven't moved in a year. By the default, they can't even do anything.   And, additionally,   by, like   even when it's time for them to use a key, they only have a single key. So at at worst case like, uncle uncle Jim Mode,  

[00:30:22] ODELL:

I set up my nephew and he has   a two of three   and   he loses two of his keys. And then at some point it degrades to a two of four. He uses one of his keys. I use my backup key. Right. But the whole time, I couldn't spend his funds Think of. Without his permission, but I still act as a as a backup.  

[00:30:43] Rob Hamilton:

Exactly. Yeah. So I think that's, like, a really powerful use case of how you if you're thinking about it as a sovereign individual, I think that's, like, the most compelling use case in making it disaster proof. And further,   you could have it be maybe at,   one year at one year, it's,   you know, you, and then maybe   after two years, it's someone else. Right? You can have different things. And what's really interesting too   is when you combine Taproot with MiniScript,   you're able to actually do these all as different tap leaves. I'm not sure if you saw the recent mempool feature that got launched. Yeah. It's awesome. It's really cool. And for those at home who haven't seen it yet, it allows you to for tab root addresses. Now mind you, this will only work if you reuse the address because by default, mempool doesn't know that address one and address two are linked. But if you reuse the address when you spend.   So when you spend. Yeah. So you can have multiple spending conditions within a Taproot address.  

And if you reuse that address and you use the different spending paths,   mempool will visualize the whole Merkle tree that's used in Taproot to show you the different spending conditions you're using.   What's really cool is that people have done this and combined it with,   Schnorr   to be able to do Musig. So you can see a bunch of different single SIGs,   but you don't realize that those are actually all, like, different two of three. So you have key one like, Nuntuck actually implemented this. You have key one if you have three keys, a, b, and c, you could have your primary path be key a and key b. Right? That just looks like a normal single SIG.   Right? And then key a and key c   can be one tap leaf, and that only looks like a single sig because you do music within that leaf. And then you could have the other leaf b, key b, and key c, and that's just a single sig because it look it's music underneath underneath. Right? And it all looks like single sig, but you actually have different permutations of multisigs   underneath the hood.  

So that's a really interesting use case for what ManyServe could do is it could allow you to set up these rules if you wanted to, and it would, quote, just work, and it would build the entire Tap script for you and all that stuff, not have to worry about it.  

[00:32:44] ODELL:

Okay. What is anchor watch?  

[00:32:47] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. So anchor watch is a nautical term referring to the crew of sailors who watch the ship when you're at anchor or at port. And we use that as our kind of our calling for,   why we named the company that is because we're offering,  

[00:33:00] ODELL:

big Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.   We're investors. I didn't know this was the derivation of the name. So they're at port.   They're   they're anchored.  

[00:33:10] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. Whenever you're at anchor,  

[00:33:12] ODELL:

like And and and are are they on the ship, or are they onshore? They're on the ship. No. They're on the ship. At the anchor and just making sure it doesn't come loose? Yeah. So  

[00:33:22] Rob Hamilton:

the more common use case of where the it's like the night's watch. So if you have to anchor the ship tonight, then you're in the middle of the ocean, you're the it's the patrol section. You don't drift.   You wanna make sure you don't drift. Don't hit anything. If any if a ship's coming, you wanna make sure you like they're the night's watch that are watching over the the ship. Okay. Got it. Okay. Continue.   Yeah. So that's actually the original derivation of the name and credit to American Hoddle who came up with that name when we were initially kind of like figuring out like a good   nautical fun theme to kind of, like, wrap the company name around.  

So we offer insurance for Bitcoin and gold storage. Right? That's the ultimate premise. And that,   as Bitcoin kinda continues to grow,   there's a massive gap in the market for custodians in the amount   kind of like you as an end consumer, what kind of protections you have.   Really, like, if you're looking at it, I think Coinbase has a $300,000,000   insurance policy, and they have $400,000,000,000   of assets under management. Right? And so if something goes wrong, you're, like, an unsecured creditor.   Right? You're not really in a position to be able to,   you know, make sure that if you have one Bitcoin on there, you're gonna get 1 Bitcoin out because it's, like, fractions of the insurance. They have is bullshit. Yeah.  

It's not the way that if I was using a custodian, I feel good about insurance. And what we've really seen in the industry is that insurance has been used as a marketing tool to be like, oh, well, we have insurance. Right?   And really, you start looking at the details. You're like, wait a second. Do do I I don't have you have insurance. You have an insurance policy most likely with your name on it. I'm not named on it. Right? So this gets into, like, if you're going to care about insurance coverage And then it's also it's like they have, like, one it'd be like having home insurance, but only insuring, like, the bedroom   Right. Or, like, the front door. Right. If you had a whole city block and, basically, you had   one half like, you had one insurance policy for a single house, and but it's a whole, like, New York City block of, like, apartments and houses and buildings. Like, it's it's not representative of the amount of risk that sits there. And then you're not even named on the policy.  

Right? You're, like, in Right. In this case, like, it it's you know, the the the bank like, it's like the title hold like, the person holding the coins themselves are named. You individually aren't named. And so this was kind of a an idea of and as Bitcoin continues to financialize,   you're going to need to have better counterparty   risk management. And in the bucket of risk management, there's really one thing everyone's done up to this point, which is risk mitigation, risk distribution. Right? A perfect example of this well before institutions and suits were around is the idea of, like, I can have an online offline backup with my keys. And then you had, like, I'm gonna punch it into metal. And then you had, I'm gonna make a multisig. Right? That was all because   with when when you're holding Bitcoin in self custody, what you're doing is you're self insuring. You're saying, I'm gonna hold all the risk. And if something goes   wrong, it's my fault, my problem. Right? There's no one else that, like, comes in. And so what insurances is risk transferring, and that's fundamentally what we're doing to kind of revisit what it looks like to if you're paying for custody fees, what does actual commensurate value look like? And for us, we are what's called the Lloyd's of London co cover holder.  

So,   we don't have a,   I would say, a superficial Lloyd's of London title. We are direct agents of Lloyd's of London that manage all of the underwriting, the distribution, and that all gets paired with our custody technology platform, Trident, offering you, when you get an egg watch policy, it's with your name on it, a Lloyds of London insurance policy tied to your Bitcoin in your vault. Right? It's a direct one to one relationship. It's kind of first in the market,   and it's kind of I would say,   our long term thesis, it's going to be the direction in which   institutional custody of Bitcoin starts going to. What's interesting with how we've built our product,   the first one that we launched with, is that you also hold keys.  

Right? Which allows a certain level of kind of what we call negative control at AnchorWatch. Never can AnchorWatch unilaterally spend your Bitcoin   ever. Bar none, never. No asterisk, no exception to that.   For the majority of the life of your vault, it requires   keys from you as the customer as well as us, which allows us to do several interesting things where,   if someone broke into your house,   took your keys, let's say you like, you gave them the pin phrase, and they went to go try and sign and spend money, the funds you may have lost your keys, but you haven't lost your Bitcoin, which is an interesting concept that people really haven't seen so far when you're dealing, like, in the self custody model, like a pure just pure pure self custody model. Whereas us, we I do this as, like, joint custody because for the length of the insurance policy, we're a required cosigner.   This is a whole different paradigm also in risk distribution. Whereas the reason why a Coinbase can only get, like, a $300,000,000   cover, they probably could get more if they really wanted to, but they're not gonna get one to one, is that all of the keys are at Coinbase.  

So all of the risk is at one company. And because all of the risk is sitting at one company, you now have this model where it's a risk concentration that's parasitic to, like, underwriting in general. And so this is actually how we creatively leverage MiniScript is doing this joint custody model where for the length of your policy, it's a two of three from AnchorWatch. It's a two of three   from the customer, and they both have to cosign to move funds. There is a window at month eleven where if you as the customer lost all of your keys,   Anchor   Watch plus CoinCorner based out of the Isle Of Man can come together to recover those funds as to be able to return them to you. So we actually it's also kind of a different flavor too on, like, multi jurisdictional   custody too because the keys never,   like and and sorry. And one last step. The final layer after your insurance policy expires   is that you unilaterally   can actually take the Bitcoin yourself in your two of three and remove them from the vault. Right? Right? So it's a different custodial relationship than you would have. It's like, hello,   you know, custodian. I would like my Bitcoin back, please.  

By default,   it will go back to your full sovereign control at the end of the insurance policy. When we And then if you lose your keys at that point after that,   Anchor Watch and Coin Corner can come together to salvage the Bitcoin. We could. Right? Yeah. So this is a yes. You're actually ready. After the customer gets unilateral control? Yeah. Or is it at the same time? No. No. So, after the customer gets unilateral control, this is the nature of   time. It only goes in one direction. So the way time locks work in Bitcoin is that thank you. I wasn't sure about that. So the way it works is that you have time going in one direction.   Once a time lock has been satisfied,   you can't because the way it works is, like, has this are we greater than or   or before this whatever the time is. And since you're always in the future, that spending path is always available. You would need something like an op expire, which is an opcode Peter Todd proposed of, like, I I wanna be able to, like, expire a spending condition after a certain amount of time. Right. No one's really talking about it right now, but, like, conceptually, you would need something like that to,   definitively, like, remove our, our control. But we encourage you and ask you to,   remove your funds out once that that expires because we don't wanna be in a position where we're able to participate anyway.  



[00:40:14] ODELL:

So if we do step the process so then you have to create a new transaction?  

[00:40:18] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. You can create a transaction out. Yeah. You'd be able to create a transaction to move the funds out. And so what we do actually during onboarding But then you wanna renew  

[00:40:26] ODELL:

like, let's say, I still want insurance. Are the policies all year?  

[00:40:29] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. They're one year policies right now, but we are actually able to do So, like, it's thirteen months Oh, yeah. Yeah. So when it comes time for renewal, we can roll it over into a new one. We're we're happy to do that with people. Yeah. So we'd be able to help move the funds an on chain transaction.   It does.  

[00:40:45] ODELL:

So every year, you're doing an on chain transaction to move it into the next one year policy.  

[00:40:50] Rob Hamilton:

That's correct.  

[00:40:51] ODELL:

Yeah. So correct me if I'm   wrong. Anchor watch is two pieces.   One piece is using mini script to reduce the risk of having funds lost or stolen in a self custody environment.   And then the second piece is adding insurance on top of it because the risk is so reduced that it's actually something   underwriters can really ensure.  

[00:41:11] Rob Hamilton:

Exactly. Yeah. They're they're very tightly linked in that,   our ability to distribute. Like, the technology is what enables it to actually be appeasing to, like,   an advertising risk for underwriters.   Right? So Right. It's an interesting way of leveraging our point low risk, specifically. Yeah. Very low risk. Incredibly low risk. Yeah. And that's why our our pricing starts at 40 basis points per year,  

[00:41:33] ODELL:

for the insurance piece. Like So that's point 4%   to the Nazis out there. That's right.  

[00:41:39] Rob Hamilton:

And that's just,   I think when if you're in very, very large size, you can get single digit basis point cost, but that's uninsured. Or some fractional shared amount of an existing insurance policy that you're maybe pennies on the dollar. I don't know. You'd have to check, with who you're working with.   But if for most people, they're paying for uninsured custody. They're closer to, like, the 20 to 40 basis point range already,   especially if you're not in large size.   We're live in The United States. We're working on expanding out to, like, The United Kingdom. That's more on the insurance regulatory side. Like, the same it's in the same ballpark as, like, the,  

[00:42:14] ODELL:

ETF fees.  

[00:42:16] Rob Hamilton:

That's a great benchmark to compare against, yeah, for the ETF fees. Yeah. But it's your Bitcoin and your vault,   insurance custody. Self custody.   Yeah.   So it's a whole So shift.  

[00:42:27] ODELL:

So   to do all of this in a user friendly way,   you guys basically build from scratch a self custody mini script enabled   wallet  

[00:42:39] Rob Hamilton:

called Trident Wallet. So yeah. And so that's actually for the first six months of the company.   I had, like, nagging the back of my head, like, oh, I could build a wallet. And I was like, let me keep it really small and lean. It was just myself and Becca and one other like, I was like, I didn't wanna go too crazy. And then it just became pretty apparent that to be able to leverage these more advanced security arrangements, we had to build our own. So we ended up dogfooding. We built Trident Vault,   which is our wallet that handles all this with, I would say, a pretty clean UX to be able to,   manage deposits, doing spends,   being able to do all of the information that you would need to construct your Bitcoin transactions and be able to, like, use your Bitcoin.  



[00:43:16] ODELL:

And then you use that with hardware wallets.  

[00:43:19] Rob Hamilton:

Correct.   So live today, we have the ledger.   I have the cold card working locally.   I am working on sequencing that out to be able to turn on. I have it working for both the micro SD,   as well as the b b q r. I have it all working. It's just a question of sequencing in and turning it on.   Additionally,   I used to have the Spectre DIY on an older built work. I'd have to go revisit that. And then, like, you know, there's the blockchain jade as well. So there's a couple other wallets that are, like, in the wings, so to speak, to get at it.   For for us, it's really important to,   a nice feature that I like to talk about. For the power users,   we give you the full output descriptor of your vault. You can load into Bitcoin Core. Like, I'll have customers that get onboarded. They're super excited,   and I walk it through how to load into the we have a nice little recovery PDF. You can just copy and paste the command, load into Bitcoin Core, and it works.  

So you can actually look at your own deposit addresses, look at your transaction history, look at all of that, and it all natively works. So it's a whole different,   it's nice to be able to also just be able you don't have to trust us in the same sense because you could be like, oh, this is what's on my insurance policy. I have this right here. I'm looking at the balances. I see it. I have a like, a it's totally matched. So you don't have to natively you can use the software. You can verify. Absolutely. The  

[00:44:34] ODELL:

would you say that someone who can single sig   with a hardware wallet and Sparrow   can do this?  

[00:44:42] Rob Hamilton:

Yes.   I'm saying you can.   It would be a preference down to your hardware wallet probably for a lot of the single sig cold,   single sig Sparrow users would be using a cold card. So you'll we get closer to that kind of UX   in the future when we add it.   The other thing too is   we could make a vault that's just a single six. So you only have one key to manage you as a customer. Like, that's another option too. And then you really I have one wallet. I have one thing to sign. I keep it here. Anchor watch cosigns. And And at that point, the user experience,   once you do the initial setup, like, the initial handshake of, like, hey. I'm entering   another wallet, and you have to do this if it's anything but a single sync. And the reason why is you want your hardware wallet to be aware of, okay.  

There's some larger wallet that exists beyond my wallet   my hardware wallet I want to be aware of, and you do that registration   as a onetime thing. And after that, everything is the same. You pass in the PSVT. You look at the transaction. You review it. You sign it. All of that UX is identical after you do that initial kind of registration, and we do that as part of the onboarding call. So if you have questions, we can walk through that whole thing, and then we're able to kinda set you up in a really nice spot where you're in a position where you have your key. You're able to manage it. If you wanna spend, you spend just like you would for any other multisignature   wallet,   and it all works. And mostly also too for, like, a single sync. Right? You just pass in the PSPT. It works. Kick it out. Get the signature. Submit it. We do our cosigning.  

Transaction broadcast at the network. So I think the UX has come especially in the past two years because I know we were,   downstairs at the, the Park Studio. And, unfortunately, I'd be sitting there today, but Rod's recording the two fifty six podcast.   So I have to be in one of the other side offices.   The I was showing you, like, here it is, like and it works like this. And at that time,   I was, like, three months into building the initial prototypes, and it was all running in, like, local code terminal windows and, like, passing it around. Like, it was very janky.   We've done a lot of, laps and iterations in the past few years on really refining the UX, so it's something that you would get with any other kind of general wallet.  

I have a tweet for that. I don't think it's my pinned tweet, but I shall could also cross post it over the nostril so people would be able to, take I think I did post it in a nostril. I'm gonna have to go check now. I did, like, a ten minute video walking through the UI and showing how it all works.   But, yeah, like Yeah. That's an awesome demo. I've seen that. Yeah. So it's a good ten minute, like, walk through if you're curious to be able to, understand that. Maybe I'll try to get you to is my point.   Very accessible. Yeah. It's a very long winded way of saying you can do it. Listen. If you want, like, the high signal, less words, you can bring back on to sit at all dispatch. Dispatch. If you want me to wax poetically about Bitcoin script and go along in the tooth, I could,   you you want me on the show.  



[00:47:30] ODELL:

I would just say   that ten thirty one has invested in 35 Bitcoin businesses.   The longest calls are the anchor watch calls. They just go on and on and on and on. They're very descriptive   in a good way in a good way, but they are by far the longest calls. We pride ourselves on transparency to our investors.   I,   okay. Okay. So Trident Wallet is used for all the setup and management and whatnot.   It's not open source. Why is it not open source?  

[00:48:04] Rob Hamilton:

It is not open source. And the question is why not open source?   Yeah.   Yeah. That's my question.   I   it's interesting. Building a business, I've had a lot of Bitcoin companies ask me about open sourcing it.   And for us, we put a lot of time and effort into it. And just to be frank, for today,   if we   did open source it, it'd probably be closer to an MIT CC license.  

[00:48:28] ODELL:

The NVK   the NVK license.  

[00:48:31] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. The NVK license. And it's just that,  

[00:48:35] ODELL:

Which is you can do anything with it except monetize it.  

[00:48:38] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. And I think for the sake of, like, being able to independently audit, you're trying to understand the security of it all. You're trying to be able to cross verify how functions work. Like, I think that's there.   It definitely doesn't encourage, like, a strong open source code base that's, like, building on top of it because they can't monetize it.   I  

[00:48:56] ODELL:

am wary of it. The concern?   Like, I don't understand what the concern is. Like, walk me through this. The,   I mean, I think first of all, MIT CC   being able to   do everything, but monetize the code would be a massive improvement.   But where's the concern? I mean, I, to me, the business is   providing   insurance,   which as someone who's seen the inside of your business is a real fucking   pain in the ass of a business to to bootstrap and get started. Like, you don't just, like, wake up one morning and, like, fork code and then get, like, a Lloyd's cover   holder   status. So, like,   as far as, like, motes go, like, I mean, it's not   you can't fork that moat. That that takes, like, significant proof of work and capital.  



[00:49:48] Rob Hamilton:

No. You can't. I guess,   the first concern is that that's a one way street.   Once it's done, there is no going back.   That's correct. Yeah. So you should be deliberate about it. Right. So it's something that we always have the option to be able to exercise, but it's something that once it's exercised, you   can't undo it.   If I were to put it into a general, like, area of, like, my apprehension around it, it's having   other people come in standing on top of our work and then monetizing then competing for existing customers.   Like, it's not really a surprise even if it's not on the strict insurance side.  

I'm quite surprised.   We are a very small engineering team. If you include myself, we are three   full time engineers.   And   I'm actually very surprised at the rate of other companies working on Bitcoin custody infrastructure   that haven't jumped on this. From really large,   very, very large companies that even do, like, everything in in, like, crypto custody in general all the way down to smaller players.   What I typically hear is that it doesn't hit their target use case or they have to refactor their UX because it changes things.   I'm   just not looking to give,   a bunch of people who are gonna be competing against my own customers today,   a massive legs up in being able to take all of our work and time and investment into this and immediately giving it to everyone.  

I'm surprised there aren't, like, open I I it surprises me that people who wanna build open source software haven't gone to tackle this problem yet. The closest are the Liana wallet guys, and Liana wallet is entirely open source.  

[00:51:23] ODELL:

They No insurance.  

[00:51:24] Rob Hamilton:

No. No. There's no insurance. It's fully self sovereign. I'm a huge fan of Leon got Leon Wallachais. I mean,   Kevin and Eduard and Antoine, Antoine's now over at Chaincode, have done an immense amount of work in kind of being able to, like, lift up the ecosystem.   Specifically, I think Antoine did a lot of the work to get mini script into Bitcoin Core. That wasn't a a small staging effort.   For us today, I have a lot of people who ask if we can work together, and then we get on we start, like, getting on a call and start working together. I'm like, well, so you could just give us all of your code. And I'm like,   why if we're working together in a partnership, why do you need my code? So I've been trying to be discerning.  

And if we ever pull that switch, making sure that we feel really comfortable   about us being able to maintain as an open source project and then be able to also run our business. It's something that you and I know off camera we've talked around a lot. But for today, it's something that I just don't wanna be able to openly just give that out to everyone right now.   I I'm curious if it's in the best shareholder long term interest.   It's not a permanent decision, though. It's very true that it could be,   something that we decide later to kinda flip the switch on and make available to everyone. And when we do, we'll have to maintain some level like a full GUI client.   I think as an initial step,   what we'll probably have to do,   just mechanically anyway, is make a very basic,   open source GUI wallet for people to download for their sovereign recovery. Because you technically can use Bitcoin Core. I'd like to offer a little bit more of the end customers so that they have something they can download   and to have a nicer user experience than using the Bitcoin Core Wallet for those who haven't used it before. It's a rough wallet to work with.  

And so   that's probably maybe the the starting place for us to be able to offer some open source software to let people,   get some of the features and being able to see how it works.   Well, I mean, let's Similar to how Unchained has Caravan.   Right? Unchained  

[00:53:11] ODELL:

talking about   yeah.   Which is fully open source. Which is fully open source.   I   I like talking about business on air. So let's just you said shareholder value. I'm one of the shareholders.   I represent   our investors who are investors in you.   I mean, I think MITCC   is relatively   uncontroversial   in terms   of people can't take the code and monetize it. Mhmm.   I mean, they could still, like,   pretend they didn't do that   Sure. But use it as a basis to build whatever they're gonna build Right. Which we've seen happen regardless.   Yep.  

There is an argument   that for certain   high value customers,   they might not wanna use something that they can at least have source viewable,   and be able to inspect what the coordinator's doing. The counterargument for that is, well, you can take the descriptor and put it into   Bitcoin Core to confirm which is open source. Right.   Right?   An analog here is   so two analogs here,   also ten thirty one portfolio companies,   is Primal   Mhmm.   And Start Nine.  

[00:54:39] Rob Hamilton:

Yes.  

[00:54:42] ODELL:

I was personally very supportive of both of them having open source stacks. Mhmm.   The,   primal's MIT.   I think star nine might be GPL.   So MIT is you can just do whatever the hell you want with it. You can close, so you can fork it and close source it and, and, and take all the work, build on top of it, not give back, do whatever   GPL you have to give back. It has to still be open source afterwards. But with start nine's   case, they are planning to monetize   mostly with services built on top.   Right. Which is separate from the stack.   They still sell hardware   and you could buy hardware for them that they do have a margin in their, their business, and then they make some money if you buy hardware, but also you can just take an old computer or build your own computer and run start nine.  

And then with primal,   also premium service kind of type of situation. And I would say, like, Anchor Watch, you can kind of put it in a premium service bucket even though it's, like, even more so because, like, insurance is, like, such a quagmire   and takes a lot of expertise to, like, make happen.   And there's probably an argument   that it's a more difficult path.   But I also think it's, like, the it's better for humanity,   which in itself is shareholder value. Right? Like, what is the end goal?   This sounds like the goal is of is is flourishing   humanity flourishing. Right? Like, you want your kids to live in a better world.  

So   To to quote that's my I I I don't really have a that's my argument, I guess.  

[00:56:25] Rob Hamilton:

I mean, to quote the late great Norma McDonald,   no offense, but that sounds like a bunch of commie gobble.   That that last line about   we're all it this is stakeholder capitalism. That that's like a that's a Klaus Schwab line of, like, the stakeholder   capitalism of humanity.  

[00:56:42] ODELL:

It's Klaus Schwab. It's for humanity.  

[00:56:45] Rob Hamilton:

Klaus Schwab is not pro is not pro open source. What what for the for the for the stakeholders of this planet? Like, that's where the value gets created. No.   So to  

[00:56:55] ODELL:

with that I can't believe you just called me the Klaus Schwab.  

[00:56:58] Rob Hamilton:

Well, I love I I love that norm that Norm McDonald line. No offense. That sounds like a bunch of commie gobbledygook.  

[00:57:03] ODELL:

That was That's a fair it's a fair response.  

[00:57:06] Rob Hamilton:

But the seriously. But  

[00:57:08] ODELL:

it it doesn't come from a commie perspective. It comes from the opposite.  

[00:57:12] Rob Hamilton:

Let let's talk some business on air. Right?   If there, I would say, is probably a general model   of   where you have certain business logic that you would not open source, which is kind of where you make your money.   Right? You don't open source the part that makes the money.   You open source kind of like the end user tooling.   And so first, like, on an engineering team with competing, like, priorities and features and things that we work on, we'd have to spend some time pulling out some things that we wouldn't wanna open source while giving everyone the general open source tooling.   That's not just insurance stuff. Right? We,   we've put a lot of effort and thought into the security   of how we go about each step of the entire life cycle of a customer.  

And that may I could open source everything, and they wouldn't I there's no reason for me to open source those things because it's technically functional. I just don't have my guardrails in there that do all of the things that we offer for our security. So now we have to be able to have a   parallel,   like, repo of us doing some things, and then we have to kinda, like, upstream some things.   I think they're like, that it that's a time tax. Right? Because we're not like, first off, if we went and open sourced it, we probably wouldn't open source all of the,   front end code. We'd have to make a new general just like here is the reskinned version. Just like when with Caravan being open source for Unchained,   they don't open source the entire Unchained.com   black dashboard you log into. They have a skinned down version that doesn't have the Unchained branding, and it all technically works.  

So that that would be a meaningful engineering lift and task.   The next thing   yeah. And I guess to repeat this, so it's like   removing and stripping out those features, kind of juggling and managing that in there would be the way you would probably do that. And I   for businesses that do open source stuff,   like, I'm I'm thinking about, like,   no. The bank key is not open source. Is it? They're MITCC?  

[00:59:13] ODELL:

Yeah. The MBK license.  

[00:59:15] Rob Hamilton:

Right. But they don't open source their server code on how their server HSM works. Right?   Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch because it's their key. No. Because it's their key. Right? So if it's their key, they don't have to open source that. So, like, there would have to be, like, a a bifurcation And I also don't know, like,  

[00:59:32] ODELL:

how do you even verify what's running on the Bitkey?  

[00:59:35] Rob Hamilton:

Well, that's the other thing too because it's hardware. Right? Like, it I I like the Bitkey project. Like, I think it's great. I I I I'm I'm looking to them as someone who who are people who have a model   of open source? No. Because I have, like, I'm thinking of of of parallels. You have Unchained as an open source. You have the Bitkey, which is an open source stack.   Casa, the app is not open source, but you since it's a generic multisig, you can load it into Electrum or Sparrow or whatever, and it all works. Right. I'm trying to think of I'm trying to think of parallels in the ecosystem.   And so that would that it's just a lot of, like, engineering time and effort on our side that then takes away from us building forward on other things. Like I said, I'm not strictly opposed to it, and I probably will probably, by the end of this year, have some version of an open source GUI that allows, like, the basic, like, recovery in the event, like, you wanna be able to after your policy expires, you wanna be able to pull the funds.  

We'll probably have some version of that so you don't have to work with just Bitcoin Corp.   But that's something to keep in mind. And probably, we can load that too so you can have your own software that's loading and checking the balances and doing that stuff.   Those are all things that we could probably start with.   And since those are just kind of, like, general   features that aren't really   special or secret,   like, I have no problem opening those. I think an interesting part of this too, though, is as a, like, as a steward of software, we at Inkwatch are heavily relying on the Bitcoin dev kit project. Right?   And a couple things with that, there's ways that we give back. One, we're one of the inaugural corporate sponsors for the Bitcoin DevKit Foundation. There's a nonprofit that does all of the development for the Bitcoin DevKit project.  

We're a proud sponsor of them because we wanna be able to give back to people who build really great software that we build on top of.   The second thing too is we also upstream code.   So when we officially first started working with,   BDK,   there was no real database persistent support. So we helped stand up, like, the BDK's,   SQLX,   like,   repo.   And we open sourced that to BDK. BDK is actually now kind of, like, built on top of that for being able to have SQLite post credits, like, database support. So those are ways that we are able to kind of give back and feed into the ecosystem, not to mention just regularly us finding features and requests and, like, finding, like, issues and being able to report those that get democratized to everyone using the software. So those are, like, examples of an in between where our direct code is not available, but our efforts are still being able to give back to the larger open source software movement.  

[01:02:03] ODELL:

Well, that's awesome.   Proud of you.   Do do you,   by the way, I wanna correct myself.   Start nine has moved to a full MIT license, so you can just take that code and do whatever the hell you want with it. Nice.   Which is commendable.   I,   you know, that's awesome that you support the BDK project. I love those guys. They're fantastic and it's good to be   proper stewards. I just wanna push back once again on the commie commie comment,   like to me,   and I, I think you're aligned to this. Like, to me, the dream is   ethical, incredibly profitable businesses   that also maintain   open source stacks,   that can be effectively   built and iterated on and   kind of obsolete the   Google's don't be evil mantra and replace it with the can't be evil mantra.  

And to me, that's the dream. And part of the reason ten thirty one exists is because that's the harder path, and most investors would never even touch that.  

[01:03:14] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. It's definitely the harder path   for sure. I've actually I'm trying to remember the name of the libraries. There have been a couple open source libraries that have been migrating to   a closed source version.   These are general web ones, nothing related to Bitcoin.   And   I think this is actually an interesting as a brief touch point,   on both sides   for   AI   and vibe coding and all of this stuff is that there's kind of two arguments with this, and this is something I've been thinking about recently. So this is not something I have a firm answer on. The one side would be   that the marginal effort for someone sitting in their basement   that understands prompt engineering and the context when this for LLM models, could they build   a fully end to end open source manuscript by wallet   way easier for sure than two years ago.  

Right? Not to mention because BDK has had a lot of progress over the past two years and just having more robust features and being able to kind of, like, clean and optimize things. So now that they've had their one point o release,   the documentation's better. Right? Things that you would feed into to be able to do this stuff, that moves faster. Right? So then the first side of the argument would be,   why would,   if your software is I think in the long run, this is an interesting concept,   in the in the lens of open source is that software commoditizes to zero.   And a wallet company that just does wallet stuff has never made a lot of money, and that was our thesis. Maker watches that were actually more of a financial market with the insurance side of things.  

The flip side is   is that if you open source code,   one, there's no guarantee the LLMs are actually gonna be respecting licenses. Like, it's pretty open that, like, all of these large, limited global companies   have actually went and torrented data. And they've actually went and torrented data and took them into that cost to be able to build things. Right?  

[01:05:02] ODELL:

Most humans will respect licenses.  

[01:05:05] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. I'm looking at the chat. I I I don't have the nostril chat automatically   in this, stream studios. I have to go back back and forth between this and ZapStream. No. It's it's in the live stream. You can see it.   I don't see it. Oh, I see it on the Zap Out stream. I don't see it in the,  

[01:05:22] ODELL:

in the, Yeah. It's it's in Restream. You see it. I broadcast it to everybody. It's not under the chat thing. It's in the  

[01:05:30] Rob Hamilton:

Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. I'd have to find it in the UX. But, Tom Sears says most successful companies goes close source until they make it o until they make it, then they open source. Elon is classic for doing this. And, yeah, I think, like, once you're having No. No. This is you're now you're reading that's The YouTube chat. YouTube chat. That's not the Nostra chat. Yeah. I'm like, alright. I'll go to the Nostra chat in a second, but I think that's an interesting example. Once you have once you have, like, capital scale, it's a lot easier to open source stuff. And my point is, I believe in the long run,   software commoditizes to zero and that LMS are like an accelerant on top of that. And our thesis actually with Anchor Watch is that   marketing,   I think, is entirely commoditizable,   like brand aesthetics in the sense that   a a long enduring brand may not be commoditizable,   but the ability to build brand share in the ecosystem is actually quite accelerated with, I think, more and more people using   AI aggregated and managed content anyway. Long form,   form, like, content like these podcasts   are something that today are harder to commoditize, but I think tech in the long run commoditize all that. The one thing you cannot open source is capital.  

You can't, like and this is actually the beautiful one of the beautiful innovations of Bitcoin is that it enabled you to have a fully open source software where you sold private property rights. Right? Your UTXO set, your keys are your keys, and you it's fully open. You can't open source capital, and insurance   is a capital market at the end of the day. So being able to build the system that can make the capital market work is something   that cannot be commoditized into what you said earlier. Not anyone's gonna walk off the street and get a Lloyd's of London relationship. You can't you can't vibe code a Lloyd's cover holder.   You can't. You can actually you cannot vibe code a Lloyd's cover holder at all. You're able to with less effort no. I'm gonna say with less effort, you could find a broker to place, like, a marketing headline, voids of London relationship. Like, that's the easy path. The easy path is Yeah. But then they they wouldn't be able to compete on terms.  

No. They wouldn't. No. No. Explicitly not. Right? You're you're gonna be sacrificing items more expensive. Middleman.   Yeah. There's an extra middleman, extra price,   and, like, less coverage. Like, you're you're absolutely gonna be giving up somewhere if someone says,   that you have this relationship because we have a insurance policy. Like, read those t's and c's and details. Are you individually named on that policy? So this is actually I'm I'm expanding out all these thoughts to say   that's a case to open source a software.   It is it is a case to make that.  

It's just something that I before I make that decision, I want to be really well thought out and deliberate and having the ability to,   make sure that I'm not impairing the business. Because as of today, that technology stack is part of, like, our assets as a company. And when it's open sourced,   we'll have our secret sauce things that are not in the open source code that do extra things,   that will be part of our IP. And be since we built it, we'll be in the best position to leverage and use it.   But those are things just to keep in mind. Right? So these are, like if if we're talking business on air, you know, it's funny we horseshoe this because we went macro business at the start technical, and now we're macroing we're horseshoeing back to to to business and suit stuff.  

[01:08:34] ODELL:

These are the same thing for sure. I don't think deciding whether or not you should open source   the stack is really a suit conversation. I think most suits would just say don't do it. Well, as as a suit coiner myself,  

[01:08:47] Rob Hamilton:

I'm repping the this is the PodConf brand suit coiner collection. Yeah. We'll get to PodConf and Bugle in a second. Okay.  

[01:08:56] ODELL:

You go. Do you wanna what what are we gonna say?  

[01:08:59] Rob Hamilton:

I was just gonna say,   ultimately, when I think about this stuff, these are the different pieces I think about. Marketing will is becoming more and more commoditized. Everyone's starting a podcast. Everyone's competing for attention.   Technology is gonna commoditize with AI,   more and more, like, at an accelerated rate more so than it did before. So capital markets are actually where the interesting is where you can actually capture value because you can't open source like, you can't open source capital in the same way. So these are the things I think about in building a a long term enduring business and the levers I can pull for being able to create that shareholder value.   So that's a case for you know, I it's something I I go back and forth and debate all the time.  



[01:09:38] ODELL:

I love it. Freaks,   if you have any questions for Rob, please put them in the live chat.   We will we will get to them.   But I will continue being the host for now.   Thank you, Tom, for   joining   us in the YouTube chat.   I,   privacy.   Yeah. New customer   considering, considering   using AnchorWatch.  

[01:10:09] Rob Hamilton:

What are the privacy considerations they should be thinking about? So at the top of the Noster chat, you can see I linked a mempool transaction. I'm not gonna ask you to change your production to look at it right now, but what you can say say is that going to do that. No. I'm not asking you to. But for those of the freaks in the chat, they can go click on that link and look at it.   Because the on chain transaction is unique,   you're going to have an identifiable fingerprint.  

[01:10:34] ODELL:

I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it for you. Let's see if this works.  

[01:10:38] Rob Hamilton:

All I was gonna say yeah. So perfect. So this is one of our earliest main this is one of our earliest main net transactions. You can see it was eleven months ago. If you scroll down a little bit,   on the graph here, Odell, you can actually click and see the details of the transaction.   So if you scroll down a little bit   and you click details, now this is if you keep scrolling down, that's the witness where you're actually providing your signatures in the script preimage.   If you scroll down a little bit more, this is the actual on chain smart contract that executes for trying to vault. As you can see immediately, that's a very unique fingerprint.   Ways we can mitigate this is leverage going over the Taproot, which is one of the work streams that we're we're working on right now for being able to support native Taproot.  

Additionally,   the time lock values, like like, all of these things are going to be unique fingerprints.   And so I've been thinking about different ways of managing this. The first one and the biggest one would be using music for the key path. So you have a designated happy path.   Let's say you have two like, you have,   the ability where everyone comes together and agrees these are the primary keys. And if you have the primary keys, it looks like a single sick on chain. Right? That would be leveraging,   music and snore with the tampered upgrade.   As of the state of the product today, the on chain privacy   is not there because to be able to encode these rules, you have to be able to have, the unique smart contract rule. But forget about  

[01:11:57] ODELL:

that, like, in my if I'm an AcreWatch customer, just like Lloyd's of London know they know exactly how much Bitcoin I own? Yes. And they know do they know addresses? They they know they know exactly the Bitcoin that's in your Triangle vault. Right? Because we're insuring the Bitcoin And they know the address specifically.  

[01:12:14] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. Because they have the output they have the output descriptor.   And you guys obviously have that as well. We have to to be able to serve as a wallet coordinator. Yeah. Absolutely.  

[01:12:23] ODELL:

To be able to, like, use your policy Everything else is kinda moot. Right? Like, that's the that's the big privacy.  

[01:12:29] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. Well, there is a bifurcation, though. There is an on chain privacy and an off chain privacy. I think both of those, you know, play a role in it. I know Dan Gould,   turned on, with Liana,   the the page one dev kit into Liana, which is a great example of,   thinking about different use cases because with Liana, you have to move coins every once in a while anyway to be able to refresh.   So in Liana, well, like, if I have my UTXO is about to expire on a layer, I could use that in a pay join, and I can refresh my UTXO   as part of just a normal spend, which would be Well, that's what they're using it for. Yeah. No. And it's it's a great way to be able to kind of, like, two for one, like, I'm not just doing a self send. Like, you can But that's not really relevant for you because you're using absolute time locks, not That's correct. No. That that is correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just kind of giving Dan Gould a shout out and the Lianna guys a shout out.  

Yeah. So since we're your counterparty, we have to know what Bitcoin's there because we're, one, we're managing all of the software to serve the transactions to you. I was talking to   a prominent Bitcoiner. I was at UpNext   at the Strategy Headquarters last weekend, and I was talking to a prominent Bitcoiner who won't be named. I'll let you know after the show,   about how you could natively on chain   run a   private   cosigning service. And I started going down to the mechanics, and I think there's probably a cypherpunk way where they're you're able to blind x pubs, and you're able to just natively on chain kind of, like,   manage this cosigning operation,   for, like, emergency contingency spends would be really interesting.  



[01:14:00] ODELL:

Yeah. You only know the balance when you if you have to sign.  

[01:14:04] Rob Hamilton:

You'd only yeah. You'd only know actually for that address. You'd only know the one that But that's not relevant for your situation because you have to do insurance.   No. Yeah. And for our side Caravan  

[01:14:14] ODELL:

supports that now.  

[01:14:16] Rob Hamilton:

Caravan supports  

[01:14:17] ODELL:

what?   Blinded ex pups.  

[01:14:21] Rob Hamilton:

Sick. I think I think Michael Flaxman's blinded ex pup protocol is like something that's massively That's basically what they implemented.   No. That's amazing.  

[01:14:28] ODELL:

But you can use it for, like, main level on chain, but you can use it if you do caravan. So, like, I could do an uncle Jim scenario   Mhmm. Where I hold one key in my nephew's multisig,   but I have no idea how much Bitcoin he has unless he fucks up and needs me to sign. And then at that point, I wouldn't know. Exactly.   Yeah. And without getting to the technical mechanics of it, it's a really handy way that you can hold a key for someone, but they don't know anything until you actually need them. Yeah. Because I don't wanna know I don't wanna know how much Bitcoin my nephew has, let alone be able to spend it. Like, I definitely don't wanna be able to spend it. Right. But I would also rather not be compelled to say how much he has. Yeah.  

[01:15:06] Rob Hamilton:

Another interesting process that on me. I don't want that liability. No. A %. You, like, you can it's, you can't do evil because you don't know. Right? You're just totally, like, information, like, you're there's no way evil versus   Don't do evil. Don't do evil. Because if you say you're not gonna do evil, you use most people usually do evil. Eventually. Well, you saw that, Firefox changed their licensing, like, their terms of service where they're like,   we will never sell your data, and that's a promise. And then, like, the git commit removes the and that's a promise. I think that was I think that was just a lawyer thing.  

[01:15:37] ODELL:

I think a lawyer was like, you can't say that.  

[01:15:40] Rob Hamilton:

Understood.  

[01:15:41] ODELL:

Maybe yeah. That that's totally possible. Really cool spot on. It is with these businesses. It's like so much lawyer speak. Especially, you get lawyers in there. They're like, holy shit. Like, how are you promising this? You can't you can't speak in absolutes. Do you know who's a great lawyer, though?  

[01:15:55] Rob Hamilton:

Who? Zach Shapiro  

[01:15:57] ODELL:

at Zach Shapiro is a fantastic lawyer. And help me run the I've had him on this question. I know you have.  

[01:16:03] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. I know you have. Yeah. The peer to peer rights foundation. So he's helping run all that and kind of doing advisory services for the samurai case as well.   See there are a couple of good lawyers out there.  

[01:16:15] ODELL:

Okay. So let's talk.   I so did you see this comment from a random end pub,   who zapped 21,000 sats? Thank you for supporting the show. The key challenge with MIT plus CC, GPL, etcetera, is you will always have those who do not respect the restrictions and just take it, give nothing back, and try and compete against you. See the recent controversy around BIDX, Lucky Miner. If you doubt this, big companies steal MIT, CC, and GPL all the time. Open source is great. Not trying to knock it, but let's just be clear about the trade offs. Yeah. I mean, I a % agree with that.  

[01:16:50] Rob Hamilton:

I didn't I saw some posts about this. So someone's taken the MITCC code and it's just being like, thanks for this. I'm gonna go take it now. And then Yeah. I mean, I don't something you could do about it. At the end of the at the end of the day, like, if you wanna enforce the shit, you gotta go to court.  

[01:17:04] ODELL:

Yep. And you have to bring government action, and it's a pain in the ass. It's expensive.   They can always rewrite keys aspects of it and, like, kind of reverse engineer it. It's not really reverse engineering, but   and claim that, like, oh, we did we're not using the same code. You know, it's not derivative code. We've seen that a million times. But that's why it's cool to me   when you have defensible business models   Yep.   That are separate of that. You I mean, I think you have to pretty much assume that someone's going to steal the code.   Like, you if don't open source it if you don't think that's the case.  

You I just think you can run a competitive sustainable business   even in that situation. Software.  

[01:17:45] Rob Hamilton:

It's an interesting point too, especially tying into LMS. You'd be like, here's this code. Can you do this but make it look very, very, very different?   Yeah. You just yeah. Exactly. You literally vibe code your way around the MITCC.  

[01:17:57] ODELL:

Right. It's super. It's probably super easy.  

[01:17:59] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah.  

[01:18:01] ODELL:

I mean, even easier now than it ever was before because of the LLMs.  

[01:18:04] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. That was my point. The trend is gonna accelerate. So, yeah, no, I think that's, I think it's a fair point. And then when, like in like two, three years,  

[01:18:12] ODELL:

you just,   like,   just, like, load the executable   executable into the fucking l 11 and be, like, okay. Write code that does exactly what this does. Right. But make it look different.   Yeah. And also make it look different. But I'm saying even if it's closed source. Right? Just like, okay. Vibe code vibe code a competitor to this piece of software. Verse cut reverse compile the binary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I I can totally see that.  

[01:18:40] Rob Hamilton:

Before I forget, also shout out to is doing the SIG Bash project, which is fun, where it's a cosigning service.  

[01:18:47] ODELL:

Dispatch. He's just not ready yet. Hell, yeah. Alright. But I I won't say anything else. I'll let him do it. I've been trying to get him on for, like, three months now. Next week is gonna be Evan Kaludis,   of Zeus.  

[01:18:59] Rob Hamilton:

I may be,   I have to fig it's not from maybe I'll just announce it here before anyone else knows. I'm thinking about come swinging by Bitcoin John and, cohosting a bit devs with them.  

[01:19:10] ODELL:

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.   It's gonna be   twenty one hundred UTC on Tuesday, the twenty second. Very nice.   I'm gonna have Evan, and then I'll figure out what the next I don't know what the next episode after that is, but, hopefully,   Arbed Out comes on soon, to talk about the SIGBASH thing. I'm pretty  

[01:19:33] Rob Hamilton:

pretty excited about that. Is great. No. I I was chatting with him, and I did, like, an initial, like, test one with him, like like, doing some test ones. It's,   it's this idea of a cosigner. I think cosigning is gonna be one of these evolved models   of scaling Bitcoin   as well as,   securing your Bitcoin. So we act as a cosigner at AnchorWatch with all of the insurance Right. And being able to, like, manage things.   You also have, like, an ARC. The way ARC scales, basically, is a cosigner. You have this ARC server, right, with your virtual UTXOs. I got to see Steven Roost do a really great presentation at Up Next talking about ARC. And, No. Let's talk about Up Next. We continue.   Yeah. And then Alex b,   from the Arc Labs team was also there, and he had a lot of Alex. Alex is good people. Alex is great. He had a main net demo of Arc, so I got to go check out, main net Arc. He had a whole When I was sitting at MIT, he was,  

[01:20:27] ODELL:

well, someone was speaking. I won't say who was speaking, and he was sitting next to me playing around with Mainnet ARC on his phone.  

[01:20:33] Rob Hamilton:

It's here. And and and I it's funny. I have no I I tweeted it out while it happened.   I tweeted out you can just cosign things. I was sitting at dinner with,   Alex,   myself, and,   and we were having a good laugh. And, basically, the fact that, cosigning allows you to   change, like, custody models. Like, that's how with Angar as a cosigner, how that works. And then for scaling too,   this idea of cosigning kind of, like, allows you to have a foot in both worlds of having your own keys and then also being able to do a bunch of off chain operations. It's collaborative custody. Collaborative custody is awesome.  

[01:21:07] ODELL:

Yeah.   The   I'm getting I'm getting sidetracked because I'm reading the comments. I shouldn't be reading the comments. I wanna talk about up next.   So let's talk about up next. How is up next?  

[01:21:29] Rob Hamilton:

Up next was a lot of guys,  

[01:21:31] ODELL:

it was at Strategies headquarters. Are you guys gonna do   a hostile  

[01:21:36] Rob Hamilton:

fork on on Bitcoin with the CIA backed? Jamis and I started breaking into all the offices trying to find the keys. We were we were just going door to door with a crowbar, just trying to find where all the sales keys were. Joke joke's on you. They don't hold their keys.   That's right. That's right.   So up next was really interesting.   This is kind of came from the inspiration of the scaling Bitcoin conferences we had from 2015 to 2019,   which were   around the conversations where we got Segwit and Taproot. Right? The idea was that typically for most, conferences they're focused on within what Bitcoin could do today. And the scaling Bitcoin conferences that ran for those years were really focused on, like, what would it look like to make updates to Bitcoin? Now,   the main buckets of things that were talked about, I would put,   there were two up, I'll build my way up. But there were two interesting conversations. James   Jameson Lop did, talk about GoldieBlox, which is the idea of a dynamic block size sometime in the future. He's just talking hypothetically, it's a research thing. And James O'Byrne did an interesting talk too just talking about, like, the cost of validating blocks, the things that we optimize for in Moore's Law, and just talking about that in a longer arc.  

The next thing, like, most Tekken must talk about probably   was in the bucket of OPCAT,   with being able to talk about on as a bucket of covenant, but enabling much more advanced things.   And then there was from Stack and CTV.   And a lot of the talks   it was very interesting,   because as with most conferences, the talks are, like, not the most interesting thing. It's being able to have conversations with people in person. So I got to meet a really great crew at TPO. Oh, John Atack did a really great talk on the BIP process   and just talking about how BIPs work.  

And so through all these different, like, conversations, I I did a panel with the head of Coinbase custody and the head of research at Bitwise with p Rizzo moderating. Talk about suits.   Yeah. And then I also did a second panel, which was Was the research guy Matthew Siegel?   I believe so. No. Ryan Rasmussen. Ryan. Ryan Okay. R. Yeah. Ryan r.   And so So you were on the suit panel? I was on the suit panel, and then we also did another panel about hardware wallets with,   Jonathan from the Bitkey team,   Rindell,   NVK, and myself, which was basically great. Yeah. It was basically like a Bitcoin dot review, like, mini episode for twenty minutes.  

So I was on those two panels, but,   it was interesting. There was a ARC panel that Steven Roost did talking about ARC today and then what it looks like to be able to do UCTV   for,   being able to, trustlessly, like, refresh.   And for, like, the question on, like, are we hostile forking Bitcoin?   No. No. No one talked activation client. Oh, two really cool interesting talks before I talk about it. No one talked about the hard part?   No. No. We we we did at the end. So the last panel was,   Jay,   from Foundry,   Ryan Gentry.   That's great. Yeah. It was a great crew and talk and we talked about the the activation stuff a little bit. Damn. You had, like there was a legit crew that were there. It was a fucking sick conference.  



[01:24:42] ODELL:

Portland Huddle Did you guys hide to to check-in to check-in to strategy's   offices, did you guys all, like, give blood samples? Like, how did that work?  

[01:24:51] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. So the first thing you had to do is you had to give up,   your one of your private keys.   You had you had to be able to kind of, like, on the way in, and then they give you they give you micro strategy shares. You actually just dump in your seed phrase, and they just have, like, a little ATM No MSTY only.   Oh, yeah. So it's MSTY ATM. You you take a picture of your seed phrase, and then they give you MSTY shares into your Fidelity account. Yeah. It was really good.   Two quick talks. Anton, and Anton did a really good talk about the great consensus cleanup and talking about like, the the great consensus cleanup is a project of basically taking all of the   known consensus bugs in Bitcoin. It doesn't add functionality really, but, like, what would it look like to merge those? And then Portland Hoddle right after did a talk showing basically how to poison blocks to make block validation happen   on a Raspberry Pi, like, thirty six hours for a single block. And he he called it the men the men pull anarchist cookbook. So he did it on rec test on his local machine, and he hid how to exactly do it. But he was talking about, this is why we wanna change consensus because   this is a pretty bad problem. And he was able to looking at, like, opens like, discussions, he was able to,   reconstruct and do these attacks. So that that was all recorded. It's all live now on YouTube.  

Bitcoin Magazine streamed it too, so you can go back and look at those streams. But for   there were interesting conversations around,   I think talking to a lot and there were other,   devs that were there.   He spoke on camera, so I feel less like I'm not docs like him or anything. Shores was there. He had some really good critiques about, like, looking for more just live demos leveraging some of this stuff. And I think that's probably the biggest call to action or different people that are building   in bit like, that one of, like, prototype these things to, like, open source and show builds on how this all functions and works.   So I think that's kind of, like, the next stage of talking about this. There was an interesting   discussion among some   around,   the,   changing of CTV. So it's only in Taproot and not on legacy script,   which I think sounds like a great optimization for reducing the amount of line changes of code and reducing the review and reducing kind of, like, the unknown. So that's something that was kind of discussed.  

InstaGibbs did a really good talk talking about the things we should be considering and thinking about when we're changing Bitcoin for future upgrades and thinking about them in, like, the weight units and thinking, like, the scale units. So that was a really good talk I'd encourage everyone to listen to as well.   And so I think the immediate call to action is getting more people building prototypes   for all this stuff.   But I think there was I would say,   a consensus that enabling   these functionalities would be helpful for many different stakeholders across Bitcoin. Even the bit VM people now are fine with CTV. Previously, they weren't.   There's an optimization to BitVM if we were to get CTV and checks it from stack. So as, like, a coalition of building rough consensus, there's more and more stakeholders come to the table that are interested in this. Me, personally, if we had CTV, I'd be able to do CTV vaults,   being able to do better vaulting technology on layer one,   that would be able to streamline operations and   make it safer to use Bitcoin and cold storage.  

So these are all things that are in the conversation. And for activations  

[01:27:59] ODELL:

Yeah. Was was Sailor there?  

[01:28:02] Rob Hamilton:

No.   Sailor on the line.   Well, I've I've met him previously,   but I didn't get to meet him at at his at his office. Do you think he supports CTV?   I think he would probably defer to   the ecosystem,   and he himself   doesn't   he would he himself would not pretend to under like, understand the nuances of all this stuff. Not I barely am scratching the surface on the nuance on a lot of this stuff. So I don't think he puts himself in that category.  

[01:28:34] ODELL:

Okay. Well, we'll see.  

[01:28:36] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Pseudo Carlos. Rob is starting to understand Marty's pain. Stop reading the comments. Yeah. No. I feel it. I feel like Carlos. Literally read the comment to read that. So you're a hypocrite.  

[01:28:46] ODELL:

You're a hypocrite.   No one likes a hypocrite.   Let's I just need to I need to pull back. I realized what I was supposed to ask, not about up next.   Really great. Not a professional podcaster.  

[01:29:00] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah.  

[01:29:02] ODELL:

You were mentioning cosigning.   Yeah. What are your thoughts on   multi institutional,   multisig,   like, collaborative custody between multiple institutions?   Customer does not hold a key Yeah. Because people are scared of keys, especially the suits. Yeah.   Is that something in Anchor Watches   roadmap? Is that something you guys are thinking about? How do you think about it?  

[01:29:29] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. The the answer is yeah. Of course. I think, like, multi institutional custody, like, pioneered   by Unchained   in the loan model.   Like, they were the first ones to think about this idea of having multiple institutions to be able to   manage keys.  

[01:29:44] ODELL:

But they still don't have keyless. Right? What I mean, keyless is a misnomer, but they don't have a product where the customer doesn't hold the key. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. So those are, like, two different things. So if I think multi institution, I think multiple institutions holding keys that started with No. But I'm talking about key like, the customer doesn't hold the key. Yeah. There's, like, a bunch of high net worths and, like, suits and companies that just don't wanna hold keys.   They still want insurance. They still don't wanna get rugged. They don't wanna rehypothecation.  

[01:30:13] Rob Hamilton:

We have   largely built out the   architecture to be able to execute that already. Right? So it's for us on a process side of figuring out the right way to do it that offers the most value to customers and being able to continue our assurances of being able to offer that one to one insurance per cut like, per for for each customer having a policy in their own name and properly structuring it. Right? I think it's a compelling way to distribute risk for sure.   It is a way of,   abstracting away a lot of the   foot guns with holding your own private key material.   I would also say that what we've built is also a way of being able to mitigate those risks and wrapping it with your own insurance contract.  

But, yeah, I think it's a it's a very compelling way to be able to offer the product and something that,   ever since I started building,   Trident Vault over two years ago, it was definitely in the vision of something I wanted to do.   When you're owning your own technology infrastructure,   you have to think about going about things deliberately   and being able to offer   the right way to offer in a way that protects customers. And so that's kind of where the thought is going into is, like, as someone who's built out the architecture,   understanding the right way to execute it.  



[01:31:33] ODELL:

I mean   no. Yeah. That makes sense.   There's like two different products, right? Cause there's one that is   individual focused. And then one that is like business focused. There's like a bunch of,   I mean, like a micro strategy, micro strategy doesn't even hold their own keys. Yep.   There's gotta be a better way of handling that   than what they're currently doing.  

[01:31:59] Rob Hamilton:

Okay. Go on. No. For sure. Say somebody, or are you just reading the live chat? No. I wasn't reading the live chat. I was,   thinking about this.   It's an interesting way. I think there's also the way that, like, Anchorage manages this. I mean, from what I've heard publicly   in that they have the end users manage stuff on their phone,   and then that acts as kind of like a cosigning to kind of like it the key isn't there on the phone, but it is a way to basically be able to authorize a spend.   I think that's a really compelling way of being able to,   offer an in between. So it's not just,   I'm holding the key for you. You have to go approve something for me. So those these are things I think about. Right? Like, in the business execution architecture,   it it's, when you're building it out and you're putting the thought and the due diligence and how to properly construct all of this stuff, they're just really important mechanics to go about doing it. I think it's a really promising way to scale   a way of distributing risk of keys for sure.  



[01:32:56] ODELL:

Makes sense.   So I really wanna talk about,   Bitcoin bugle, PodConf.   You seem to be  

[01:33:05] Rob Hamilton:

their largest fan. Before we start,   this year. Becca says this year, multi institutional custody. So  

[01:33:12] ODELL:

Yes.   So Becca's listening?   Of course. Of course, you're listening. Is she cursing me off about the open source section?  

[01:33:20] Rob Hamilton:

There is a block of text that I haven't been able to read because I'm giving my full attention to the freaks at home.  

[01:33:25] ODELL:

If by the way, guys, if you think that Rob is impressive as a founder of AnchorWatch,   Becca is more impressive.   She's the   she's the heart and soul of that business.  

[01:33:37] Rob Hamilton:

Incredibly impressive founder. Incredibly impressive. No. Yeah. Becca is amazing, and that's a whole I I no. I don't wanna derail too far from the bugle. She's also a huge fan of the bugle, by the way.   But Becca is a true treasure,   and   it's something that when Anchor Watch was literally, like, two slides that I had cobbled together,   like, the night before,   she was locked in and wanted and, basically, I basically psyched her into starting it with me. So, she's been our ride or die since the thing began. I mean, it kinda works out because she kinda psyched me into investing and you guys, so  

[01:34:15] ODELL:

it all it all comes it all comes full circle. No. We're not gonna we're in.   Okay. That's personal. That's personal. Of course.   You guys will,   what's your shareholder value? You guys, you guys bring a lot of shareholder value to us. We're very good. That's right. That's right.   Okay.   Bugle. I see them in the comments. They say Becca is also hotter.   You are a massive fan boy of Bitcoin bugle   pod comp. You're probably their biggest fan, their number one groupie,   their number one woo girl.   How do you think about the bugle? Are you on their payroll,   and, what do they bring to the space?  



[01:34:54] Rob Hamilton:

The Bitcoin   Bugle weekly podcast.   First off, you should appreciate this, Matt. They are full value to value.   They have a little I love it. They have a little donation link on every single page they do.  

[01:35:07] ODELL:

They have their just me and them. It's just dispatch and them.  

[01:35:12] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. And so   if you go to their website,   bugle.news,   they have breaking content looking at it right now. Their headline article is Donald Trump saves democracy by laying off deep state assassination   conspirators.   They have is David Bailey the new Dennis Porter? These are all articles they've written.   Should women run nodes in Bitcoin?   Financial analysts predict Babylon be to file for bankruptcy following the end of USAID.   Ripple   legal team sends blocks based letter renouncing claims that they would ever invest in Swan.   Trump to appoint YouTube sensation   Winslet Diesel as governor of Canada.  

And so they are the ones breaking the thermodynamic news in Bitcoin. Like, the and the Bugle weekly podcast, first off, we have to give name credit names. The the names behind the organization,   you have Richard,   Dick Greaser. So you have Dick Greaser and Rod Palmer,   and they are the hard hitting journalists that Bitcoin deserves.   And they are in an eternal struggle against PodConf, the podcasting conference complex.   And PodConf and the bugle are at a very tight tension of managing as PodConf says, compliance is defiance. They're not happy with your,   your your posting. I went to PodConf's nostrfeed.  

Their most recent post is only feds use UTC time.   So I think that's a little bit of a subtweet that you subtweet that you, Matt. Even though it's a tweet, but it's on Nostr.  

[01:36:39] ODELL:

UTC is amazing.   UTC is the standard. Disagrees.  

[01:36:49] Rob Hamilton:

Wow.   I didn't know that they were gonna talk about it. I was in the RHR studio a couple weeks ago, and then Rob walked me to the gas station and bought me cigarettes. That's true.   That's true.   The bugle   that that is a story that happened with the bugle.   For me, the,   the the bugle has the most cunning analysis in talking about it. They also are known for the Maxi Madness podcast. I'm not sure if anyone saw that. They couldn't find out a way to get it on Nostra, which is a huge product note over to I I got to meet Victor at the, MIT conference,   from Amethyst, but then also,   He's great. Yeah. Victor's great.  

And then also,   over for our boy,   at Primal, it where the polling feature's gonna happen?   Like, when when poll  

[01:37:36] ODELL:

We're gonna do polling soon.   And it's not gonna be gameable like,   the x polls.  

[01:37:43] Rob Hamilton:

Well, the problem is is that we didn't have compliance monitoring for the polling, so we had a lot of bot farms. And this is actually a good point to call out kind of, like, the value that compliance has in Bitcoin is that if we had a compliant polling,   maybe we've had a different result in the Maxi Madness bracket.  

[01:37:56] ODELL:

Yeah.   Pseudo Carlos, it's Vitter.   Vitter,   Pamplona   is amethyst   and Millian of primal. They're both great. We're gonna we'll have polling,   one step at a time. But, yeah, Maxi Madness, I think is I mean, it was just hilarious how much drama that caused. Oh, that it was so good. This year.  

[01:38:17] Rob Hamilton:

It was so, so good. I had a lot of fun watching that. Then also for Anchor Watch, the big one that we really care about is compliance pride month. Every June, we have compliance pride month.   Anchor Watch got second last year to fold. I think we're gonna try and run it and take for the crown this year. Oh, it's hard to out comply   a publicly traded company, but, Becca and I at Anchor Watch really put a lot of pride in our compliance. What did I win? Did I win I won grumpiest podcaster?   You were the grumpiest podcaster.   Yeah. Grumpiest. Right. Question from the Bugle guys. They wanna know This is an honor and a privilege. Did you guys did Matt, did you start the GM Nostr   sensation to try and No. Psyop people into thinking you're not the grumpiest person by wishing everyone good morning every day on Nostr?  



[01:39:00] ODELL:

I mean, look, I can't, you can't defend. I can't defend myself here because I might be perceived as grumpy. So   I I'm, I I'm, I'm honored and it's a privilege.   Yeah, no, they do really good stuff. It's a good, it's a good trap. They know the trap. Well, I will say to the bugle,   your greatest piece   was,   your expose about me last bear market,   of of   of me not being stay stay me not staying humble and having yachts and hoes   in Dubai, I think, or something. There's like I there's dozens of people that believed it.   So Touche.  



[01:39:37] Rob Hamilton:

Yeah. Well, do you have any comment about that? Like, it that's a pretty a big OPSEC blow they were able to find that about you.   Do you have no comments on the yachts and the women? Okay. That's fine. No comments, probably the best because you've been doxxed. Like, it's it's hard to I've never I've never owned a yacht, and I have a single lady. Well, your modest humble ride or die. What? Rented the you just rented the yacht. You're you're trying to be a little humble, so you just rented the yacht. You Anyway leased a yacht.  

[01:40:07] ODELL:

I would say that I'm very grateful that, I'm very grateful that the Bugle Boys are here.   And I'm I've once again, honored and privileged to be rated the most grumpy podcaster.   The the part that hurt the part that hurt was who I was up against,   more than anything. But,  

[01:40:25] Rob Hamilton:

the the title itself is great. That's right. Did you did see,   they were the number one,   fountain podcast last week.   Dick Greaser had a ninety minute debate with, Mike Brock about thermodynamics and Bitcoin. Yeah. That one was just mean.  

[01:40:41] ODELL:

That one was just mean.  

[01:40:45] Rob Hamilton:

I I my favorite takeaway for that was Dick said that Atlas Shrugged is a good book because cigarettes are a main character.   And I never thought of it that way before, but this is why,   Dick is a credentialed journalist,   has put in the thought and work into all this stuff.  

[01:41:00] ODELL:

That was,   definitely hilarious,   but probably the closest the bugle has come to crossing the line.  

[01:41:08] Rob Hamilton:

The,   they do really great stuff, though. The Bugle weekly podcast, they only are on fountain. They don't post anywhere else. They post They're, like, dominant wave they dominate Wave Lake. There's a wave lake. Generated slop. Oh, it's so good. They were on the AI wave way before it was mass commoditized.   They did an ad read from me,   that I did. They did not use AI. It just sounded like AI, but it was my, ITT,  

[01:41:33] ODELL:

tech cyberpunk degree and how I used to work at the top. Tech. And then I went to ITT tech school. Yeah. That's that's a reference that the Zoomers do not No. Do not recognize. Online university,  

[01:41:45] Rob Hamilton:

like, online university for their cyberpunk school, and I went from working at Best Buy on the Geek Squad to starting my own Bitcoin company. And, like, that was all thanks to the ITT Tech, cypherpunk school. And it they put these ad reads right in the middle of everything. It's very beautifully architected. I've been on so their their first guest was Marty Ben. Their first guest well, sorry. It was party Ben. Like AI. It was AI Marty. Right? I think it was no. It was it was a real Marty. I was on. It was the real me.   You should Matt, you should come on. I think you guys would have a really great time with him. You guys could all talk to him. Already been on?  

I don't think you've been on. Wow.   Yeah.  

[01:42:23] ODELL:

It's offensive.  

[01:42:24] Rob Hamilton:

Well, the Bugle guys do great work. Bugle.news. Check them out. They're on,   fountain too. Go to the fountain. That's Bugle weekly podcast. There's a lot of great content there. Check them out. I am not really not. I'm not  

[01:42:35] ODELL:

not. I'm not journalism.  

[01:42:37] Rob Hamilton:

I'm not PodConf. I'm just a very early fan,   and I'm working hard to get my forty hours per week of Bitcoin podcast in by recording forty hours a week of Bitcoin podcast because that's actually where the shareholder value is, is recording What is the four listening to listening to forty hours? Don't listen to forty hours of Bitcoin podcast a week. No one, like, learned how to drive by listening to forty hours   of driving podcast. Just drive the car. This is probably gonna be a bugle article that you're renouncing forty hours per week. That's pretty, that's pretty big. 40hpw.com.   Does someone actually have that domain? 40hpw.com.  

Please tell me someone. They do.   That that, you know, that it's a good domain.   There's other good domains out there too.  

[01:43:19] ODELL:

Suit corners.   Suit corners. Good term. The suit corners are amongst us.   Okay. Well, I'm glad you covered that important   topic.  

[01:43:29] Rob Hamilton:

The most important.  

[01:43:31] ODELL:

I do truly appreciate that. And I think PodConference is fucking hilarious.  

[01:43:35] Rob Hamilton:

I think,   they're running an important mission.  

[01:43:43] ODELL:

I'm sorry. I'm reading the comments.   Pseudo Carlos. Pseudo Carlos is listening to our full back catalog of our HR, and I Yeah. Feel like I nagged him by telling him not to listen to forty hours of click on podcast per week. And he's Yeah.  

[01:43:56] Rob Hamilton:

You you Okay.   When Carlos said that I was, like, one of the first what was it, Carlos? You said I was one of the first, like, live donations for our HR. Because he was looking through the backlog, and it was, like, $20.18 or something, and I did, like, a zap I I did some sort of donation or something, and he said I was the first one. A BTC pay server.   Yeah.   So I thought that was an interesting call.   Four years before Anchor Watch existed, I was, do make it first on RHR as a freak. Pre zaps.   Yeah. Pre zaps. I  

[01:44:25] ODELL:

have no topics,   left to talk about.  

[01:44:30] Rob Hamilton:

I think This has been a great rip. It's been a really fun rip.   Yeah. I don't have anything else   to   talk about. I think we hit all of the good notes.   If you wanna learn more, you can follow my end puppy. Go to primal.net/rob.   You can follow me at rob one ham on Twitter. You can shoot me an email [email protected].   If you wanna learn more, go to anchor wash dot com if you wanna learn more about what we're doing. And,   yeah, this has been really great. Maybe we'll make it less than two years before I'm on again.  

[01:44:58] ODELL:

Yeah. Let's do you wanna do an update in six months?   And we'll   we'll let we'll let the freaks know where we stand on Anchorotch and MiniScript, and it's just good it's just good shooting the shit. I enjoy,   I've always enjoyed our private conversations, so it's good to have more public conversations. You know?  

[01:45:18] Rob Hamilton:

Oh, I totally agree. Look at that. PodConference now in the chat.  

[01:45:23] ODELL:

I mean, PodConference is very heavy in the chat, and so is Bugle News.   And I appreciate I appreciate   either both of them or the same entity, depending on how you look at it.   They're, they're both great.   Freaks. Thank you for joining, particularly the ones in the live chat.   Thank you for supporting the show. If you support the show with Sats, it does mean a lot. It keeps me coming back   and,   stops me from being grumpy. So thank you for being a part of that.   And,   I got what? Share with your friends and family. They could search a little dispatch on on YouTube   or their favorite podcast app. Click the subscribe button, steal their phone, click the subscribe button for them.  

Next week, Evan Kaludis is joining. We're gonna talk about Zeus. We're gonna talk about Cashew.   And, that is the twenty second Tuesday at twenty one hundred UTC. UTC the standard.   We should eliminate all time zones and just use a single time zone. Doesn't have to be UTC, but it could be anything.   And   block block height is for past. UTC is for future. You can't do future block height. You have no idea what the variance is gonna be. That's true.   Enter Doesn't work.   What else? Anchorwatch.com.   They don't bite. You can reach out, see if it fits for you or not.   They're happy to walk you through the trade offs and how it all works, and they're just a great team. And I I I I'm I'm proud to support them. So, anyway, Rob, thank you for joining. Thanks very much.  

Love you freaks. Stay on the Stack Sats. Peace.